Making Fuel from Plastic Debris: Green Technology Articles: Eco20/20

Making Fuel from Plastic Debris

Once upon a time, kids snatched glass bottles to return for the nickel deposits. Then aluminum cans gained value; so they were gathered, squashed and sold. Soon, plastic bags will be counted among the booty of those who plunder discards - because now plastic can be converted into fuel.

Plastic problems

* Not so long ago, it was believed that replacing paper bags and cardboard containers with plastic packaging materials such as form-fitted trays, milk jugs, soda rings and plastic bags was a great way to save trees. But now these items are deemed menacing to the environment. Plastic debris pollutes rivers, strangles birds and entangles turtles. Plastic kills over a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals every year.

* There are approximately 46,000 pieces of floating plastic per square kilometer of ocean surface. Most of this debris has gathered in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, otherwise known as the doldrums, an area where major sea currents converge. The 10 meter deep floating plastic pile currently covers a section of the ocean that is twice the size of France. And it's growing.

o Charles Moore, the volunteer environmentalist who first discovered the mess that would eventually become known as "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch", took some measurements and determined that the concentration of small plastic flecks beneath the surface outweighed the plankton in the water. So he created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to watch the problem grow, and to study its effect.

Innovative Solution

* Now, a Japanese inventor, Akinori Ito, has discovered how to convert plastic into fuel. Using a carbon-negative system, Ito has developed a distilling process for melting plastic bags and soda bottles to an extreme temperature and trapping the vapors emitted by the heated plastic. Since plastic is made from petroleum, when the vapor is cooled it becomes a crude oil that can be immediately used for industrial machinery, generators, incinerators and other uses where refined gas is not needed. Or it can be further refined into gasoline.

o A kilogram (about 2-lbs) of plastic is needed to make a liter of oil. The machine uses approximately a kilowatt of power per liter of recovered oil. So, recovering oil using this technique would be slightly less expensive than the cost of getting crude oil from the ground. Of course, the crude was pumped to make the plastic in the first place, but that cost was paid by the stores that originally bought the bags.

The Blest Corporation, founded by Akinori Ito, now makes his carbon negative machine for school educational programs and Japanese factories. It retails for about $10,000. Ito hopes to bring that price down by mass producing the machine once the product becomes more widespread. The company also makes machines to refine the oil.